Category: Café Nim

Kitchen was certainly one of the areas of life that I tried to liberate myself.

… from culturally reinforced rules and regulations. I understood that “culture is not my friend”, and changed the way I had seen people do Persian food. Especially when I moved to Norway I regarded many of those common recipes as religious superstitions and started to do things my own way.

Amongst others, I got rid of my mom’s superstitious way of cooking rice! That for better quality rice must be “soaked, rinced and drained” prior to it being “boiled, drained and steamed”. So from those six stages I skipped the first three and made a shortcut to the last three to save time.

There I hacked a couple of other things too. Not waiting for cold water to boil in a pot and do it faster in an electric kettle first. Then pouring it in to an already hot empty pot. So deconstructing the axiom of “ingredients first, heat second”. Also removed that useless ugly “damkoni”, the fabric Iranian housholds use to cover the pot’s lid. As I assumed it’s meant to tighten the lid so steam doesn’t escape, though its actual function is to absorb the stem, so it doesn’t condence and drip in the rice.

After all the end result was still delicious!

Now turns out that my shortcuts were costly, sometimes even cancerous. And my mother was right!

Guys, those of you who don’t follow your mom’s recipe will eventually get cancer and die out. Evolution will take care of you and your recipes, so don’t dare to mutate in the codes of the collective wisdom when it comes to cuisine.

Left to the airport after my work on Friday and landed in Trondheim midnight, partied with friends and had fun big time, met with the accountant to close the company, finished the tax return forms (s), picked up the neon lights and other branded material from the cafe to ship to Oslo, took over my so-missed apartment and signed a contract renting it out again from tomorrow, gave away the last unwanted items both from the cafe and the apartment, went through around 50 unchecked letters and acted upon them, met with as many Zedgers as I possibly could passed a midnight and even got time to drop by the once in a year underground electro scene in Trondheim which luckily coincided my trip. It would have been awesome to get the chance to meet the magicians and it turned out that today is the yearly meeting of the association in Trondheim! Had more to do but sadly not possible on a weekend. I guess I am ready to head back to work in Oslo tomorrow (Monday) early morning!